N ew York City in the seventies was its own circle of hell. A deep recession came in like a night tide. Welfare cases in the city tripled during the early years of the decade. It was a city of hustlers. But there was another species of hustler in s New York City, and this one was fit and disciplined. Its brand of hustling was walking, running, turning, and jumping from class to audition to rehearsal to performance.
New York had always been a destination for dancers; traditionally, it was where they came to put the finish on their training. But in the seventies, as if they were the incandescent flip side to those Port Authority burnouts, aspiring Pavlovas, Isadoras, and Astaires positively streamed into the city.
Dance was suddenly the most vital performing art in America—the medium with the message—and the dance boom of the s was on. I f you want to pin a year to it, is as good as any. I well remember what an event it was in my neighborhood, a suburb of Chicago. As if she were a cousin, everyone rushed home to watch Liza Minnelli.
She could dance. And not just some faux tapping or a climactic kick. She could dance the work of Bob Fosse. She could isolate a hip, a shoulder. She could send a shiver from head to toe with a fleshy little seal-like frisson—the hot mama on an Arctic ice floe.
She kept up with the Fosse corps, adding her own feints and flourishes, not to mention one clearly improvised and delicately lascivious hip shimmy. The body was what the decade was about, beginning with where a body was. The international ones, obviously, were front-page news that put ballet on the map for citizens who would not otherwise have thought about classical dance.
